This disclosure relates to computer digital publishing.
Computer generated text may be defined in part by attributes such as type face and size. These attributes may be static. Each attribute may have an associated value. For prior computing platforms, a user may select a region of desired text and manually apply changes to selected attributes. A familiar example is where a user selects a region of text currently rendered at 10 points and changes this to 12 points. In so doing all of the text in the selected region may share a common size attribute value, that of 12 points for this example. Alternatively, a user may more variedly affect a region of text by applying a style. A character style, by way of example, perhaps referred to as “Normal,” may be defined with a character size set to 12 points. If the “Normal” style is applied to a region of text, the entire region of text may be rendered with this constant and uniform character size. A paragraph style may also be applied to a region of text and affect multiple attributes nearly simultaneously. A selected paragraph style may be defined to affect the font, size, interline spacing, and/or margins of a selected paragraph for instance. A style may then be used, re-used, and/or referenced and applied to a region of text. A potential drawback for prior style formatting is that the value of an attribute is constant for a given style.
Computer objects may be similarly constrained. Prior systems may accommodate a box filled with text as an object. Applying an effect such as squeezing one end of the object while expanding the other end works only upon the object. The textual content of the box object may be treated as an image. Changes may be applied to the object and not to the contents of the object, here the text. For this example, the attributes of the image are altered but not those of the underlying text. Similarly, varying the size or rotation attributes of objects may require individual attention to the separate objects.
Previous systems and methods may not accommodate scenarios where the user may want to vary the value of an attribute across a region. For prior systems, a user may only do this by manually selecting each and every individual text character or object and applying the user-intended attribute value. Because these attributes may be overrides to the individual attributes and may be specific to a particular text character or object in a particular location, they cannot be re-used. Accordingly, the user modified formatting can not be copied and re-applied to a different region of text characters or objects. Such manual variation may be time consuming and typically does not provide sufficient control or even a professional look to a project.